FRYBREAD FACE & ME: This Ponca’s Review by Cliff Taylor
My partner and I were pleasantly surprised last Friday night when we saw that there was a new Native film on Netflix called Frybread Face & Me. We watched about two seconds of the trailer and were in, forgetting about whatever else we were going to do and instead kicking back for an unplanned Native movie night. Afterwards, as the credits rolled, both of us rippling with emotion, we were so deeply satisfied, so deeply moved; geeze louise and macaroni & cheese, we were finally getting some damn near perfect Native movies, finally.
If you haven’t caught wind of it yet, Frybread Face & Me is the feature film debut of writer/director Billy Luther (Navajo, Hopi, Laguna Pueblo) and it’s about a young Navajo city kid getting dropped off to spend the summer with his grandma and cousin and assorted other relatives on the reservation. It’s a blast of relatable ndn tenderness from the start, so well done, well written, well handled in every respect, that you know right away it’s the kind of movie you’ve been waiting for as an ndn; and in my case, as an ndn who’s been living through decades of ndns portrayed on screen in disappointing and completely unrelatable ways. Like I told my partner before the first act of the film was even close to done, “You can tell that this isn’t going to be a piece of junk. For once an Indian movie that is Indian made and has a budget and isn’t all junky!”
The movie follows Benny, the city kid (played by Kier Tallman), and his much wiser, if just as tragically shadowed by hard-to-speak-of broken family elements, cousin Dawn (the Frybread Face of the title, played by Charley Hogan), as they tumble through a mix of things that I as a Plains Indian Nebraska Ponca knew like the back of my own tribe’s hand: traditional culture alarmingly foreign and soul-level personal at the same time, drunk uncles who have no problem being mean to kids, absent parents, boredom, pop-culture idols (the only VHS tape on hand at Benny’s grandma’s is John Carpenter’s Starman, which I watched with my mom several times when I was Benny’s age), and regular waves of intergenerational trauma and grief. The young actors portraying Benny and Dawn as they navigate their summer, their uncle, and the people around them, are absolutely fantastic, coming across so real and natural and true as Native kids that it’s a wonder to see in a movie (it makes total sense that Billy Luther has a background as a documentary filmmaker). They’re a delight and, like the young guns of the recently concluded Reservation Dogs, total medicine for all of us Natives who’ve always yearned to see ourselves on the screen, who’ve always yearned for representation that’s so good it actually kind of heals us.
Frybread Face & Me is funny, sweet, quotable, moving in on the territory owned by Smoke Signals for maybe too long, an instant and instantly rewatchable classic. The movie made me feel things, drift back to my own beginnings back in Nebraska, when I was kid running around and smoldering with Indian reality, trying to make sense of my relatives, kind of up to no good, reading comics, and so full of my own pain and yearning which were connected to a history I had no traction with or entrance into or real clear idea about. When their grandma narrated the final scene of the film in Dine’ (another huge awesome plus is how much Dine’ is spoken throughout the movie), my chin involuntarily quivered as not just one memory inside of me was stirred but something like the whole body of memories I walked with as an adult Native man began to vibrate. I listened to what Benny and Dawn’s grandma was saying and my spirit reached out through my flannel shirt and across the room, grasping towards something I knew but wanted more of, something I’d never known but still wanted, something that was close to me and far away too; I listened to their grandma and heard myself mentally saying, “I remember too. I remember this too.” Then I held my partner as she cried, feeling a whole world of beautifully real things of her own.
See Frybread Face & Me and have your Native soul touched, then feel grateful that we don’t have to settle for bad or half-ass or so-so Native movies anymore, but that we’re in the new era of fresh classics and long-awaited masterpieces and films telling our stories that’re as good and powerful as it gets. Maybe give the Benny or Dawn inside of you a little hug too. It wasn’t easy growing up Native and yet here we are; eating popcorn and watching sweet Native movies, here we are.
Cliff Taylor is an enrolled member of the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska. He is the author of The Memory of Souls, a memoir about the Sundance and his life/walk with the little people. He can be reached through his website @ www.cliffponca.com